Literacy Remix

Bridging Adolescents’ In and Out of School Literacies

A literate person today must be able to move comfortably among various visual and interactive information sources. So if we hope to bridge students’ real-world and school literacy practices, we must remix what we know as best practices with the new literacies our students are growing up with.

Remix, a term often associated with music, refers to using bits of previously recorded material to create something new. Authors Jesse Gainer and Diane Lapp show you how to guide student explorations into new literacy practices. You’ll see lessons in action that teach students how to use the reading, writing, learning, and communicating tools of their day-to-day lives to learn important literacy and language arts skills. The multimodal activities presented throughout this book give ideas for incorporating still and moving visual images, song lyrics, Internet sites, and other media into classroom learning to support and extend traditional academic language arts practices. (View real student examples here.)

You do not need to be an expert in technology to make use of new literacies in the classroom. Instead, openness to diverse perspectives, critical consciousness, and some basic background information can go a long way.

Literacy Remix provides an important new direction, allowing you to connect adolescents’ out-of-school interests with your in-school curriculum requirements.